Facing a devastating revenue shortfall, Cal officials dispensed with a financing plan that relied on the sale of high-priced football tickets and put their twist on Joe Kapp's legendary line:

The Bear will not quit. The Bear will . . . diversify.

Under the direction of vice chancellor John Wilton, the Bears have identified new revenue streams to help service $445 million in bonded debt resulting from the renovation of Memorial Stadium and the construction of the high-performance training center.

"The model is fairly robust -- we're awake at the switch," said Wilton, who was hired in February 2011, long after the stadium project began.

Cal began by hiring a dedicated sales staff. Based on the San Diego Padres' approach to customer service -- the Padres have an award-winning sales team -- the Bears stopped waiting for the phone to ring.

In the last 14 months, the eight-person sales staff has made more than 60,000 outbound calls, according to Solly Fulp, the athletic department's chief operating officer.

Fulp worked for Cal from 2003-08, then spent several years as a sales executive for IMG College. He returned to Berkeley in October 2011 to improve the athletic department's business development arm.

For the past 20 months, he has worked closely with Wilton and longtime athletic director Sandy Barbour to improve the flawed financing model.

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Cal has sold just 64 percent of the premium, long-term seats at the heart of its plan to pay for the most expensive facility upgrades in college sports history.

"We thought it was important to diversify," said Fulp, who added that the dedicated sales staff has generated $1.5 million in premium seat sales.

The new approach includes corporate bundles of two-year seat contracts and discounted "perk" seats available to owners of the premium plan.

Another source of cash, Wilton believes, is the stadium itself.

"We're changing it to a multi-use facility," he said.

The Bears planned all along to sell naming rights to the field. (For example: AT&T Field at Memorial Stadium). But they have combined that effort with an aggressive attempt to rent out empty space in the stadium.

One confirmed tenant is the Haas School of Business, which plans to create an innovation lab inside the stadium in which students work to solve real-world problems.

"Most schools that have sold court or field naming rights have left money on the table," said AJ Maestas, the president of Navigate Research, a Chicago-based firm that works with numerous universities, including Cal.

"But Cal is taking a smart approach to integrating its business partnerships."

The revised financing plan also includes $2.5 million annually in television money as the result of the College Football Playoff, which begins in 2014.

All told, the Bears are counting on new revenue streams to produce an average of $10 million annually for the next 40 years.

If the plan works, then the shortfall in premium seat sales won't create a financial crisis.

If the plan fails, the athletic department could spend decades in a fiscal vise.

"This has all been developed in a short amount of time, but it's been done with real urgency," Fulp said. "We have to get after it."